Billionaire Elon Musk, who is considered the richest man in the world, has become one of the most discussed figures in American politics outside the United States in recent weeks. And it's not just about his public speeches in support of Donald Trump, during one of which he raised his hand in a gesture reminiscent of a Nazi salute. The point is with what frequency and expression Musk began to speak out due to the events in Europe. What is behind his statements like this? BBC journalist Grigor Atanesyan figured out. NV publishes his material on the rights of information cooperation.
For the past decade, European leaders have debated how to protect democratic processes from hybrid threats emanating from Russia — support for populist parties, the spread of fake news on social media, and interference in elections.
But Europe found itself in a bit of a quandary when Elon Musk began to use all these techniques under the slogan MEGA—Make Europe Great Again, borrowing Trump’s main slogan for his European campaign. MAGA (Make America Great Again).
BBC investigated why Musk is seeking a change of government in Britain and European Union countries — and how European leaders are trying to respond to him.
An alternative for Germany and Britain
Last Saturday, Elon Musk joined the election rally «Alternatives for Germany» (AfD) — opposition party, which is called the far right.
If they come to power, its leaders promise to deport not only illegal migrants, but also some legal residents and even German citizens with roots in other countries.
Speaking via video link on a huge screen in the city of Halle, the billionaire campaigned to vote for the AfD and appealed to a sense of national pride. He urged those present not to be ashamed of German culture and German values and not to lose them in multiculturalism, which is eroding everything.
“Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk declared.
These words were perceived as a reference to the guilt of the German people for Nazi crimes and upset not only liberal critics, but also some of the businessman's allies.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican and ally of Donald Trump, called such calls dangerous on CNN, especially on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and warned against rewriting history.
Why is an American billionaire of South African origin suddenly so passionate about Europe? For most of his career, Musk has stayed away from politics. Until recently, he supported the Democratic Party, in the 2016 presidential election he voted for Hillary Clinton, in 2020 he voted for Joe Biden.
But over the past year, Elon Musk has become the most politically active of Silicon Valley businessmen. Having spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump's election campaign, he has entered his inner circle. After that, Musk turned his attention to Europe, where he also wants to see right-wing populists, fighters against migration and left-liberal ideology in power.
In many European countries, Musk sees the embodiment of his ideal — populist and right-wing parties have been gaining popularity and winning national and local elections over the past decade. Some of the new leaders have already become his friends, such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Maloni, who calls Musk a genius.
But Europe's two largest economies, Germany and Britain, are still bucking the trend, much to his chagrin. In the past month, the standoff has reached a new level. Earlier this year, Musk urged German voters to vote for the Alternative for Germany party in snap parliamentary elections on February 23. Having emerged as a reaction to Chancellor Angela Merkel's long rule, the party has brought together a diverse group of opponents of the status quo, including the far-right and even neo-Nazis.
Musk rejects these labels and claims that the AfD is a “common sense party” that wants to stop illegal immigration, promote business development, and create affordable and clean energy by repealing Merkel's ban on nuclear power plants.
«It is clearly wrong to present the AfD as an ultra-right force, given that Alice Weidel, the party leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! That is like Hitler? Please!» — Musk wrote in a column for Die Welt.
In mid-January, he conducted a live broadcast with Alice Weidel on his social platform X. In this conversation, both Musk and Weidel emphasized the topics on which they agreed with each other, and carefully avoided sharp angles. Thus, campaigning for the AfD and against the status quo in Germany, the billionaire spoke about the «unimaginable bureaucracy» he encountered during the construction of the Tesla factory near Berlin.
Neither Weidel nor Musk mentioned that it was her party that campaigned against the construction of the factory.
The American billionaire's intervention in the election campaign shocked German politicians, and representatives of various parties condemned it as unauthorized foreign interference in the democratic process.
In Britain, Musk's attempts to play a role in local politics have so far been viewed more philosophically, despite his regular attacks on the Labour government and Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself.
But in the past month, Musk has forced a reaction on himself and the British authorities. The fact is that with the help of a massive campaign all over the same X network, he managed to make the main topic in the country an old scandal that revealed the existence of ethnic gangs of pimps and rapists, whose victims were more than a thousand girls from poor and disadvantaged families in the north of England.
Twisting and distorting the facts, Musk accused Starmer of aiding and abetting rapist pimps and called Deputy Home Secretary Jess Phillips an “apologist for rape genocide”.
He justified this accusation by saying that Phillips did not support the idea of holding a new national inquiry into the scandal, because such an investigation was already being conducted.
And although in Britain many were also outraged by Musk's intervention in the kingdom's internal affairs, the topic he raised did not leave the front pages of newspapers, and in the end the government decided to launch separate investigations into five cities.
A nationwide audit of old cases has also been announced, which will examine the ethnic composition of criminals and their victims, as well as the cultural factors that underlie the crimes.
From innovator to agitator
The transformation of the entrepreneur into a scandalous politician began during the coronavirus pandemic.
Musk wanted to keep Tesla factories open during the lockdown, and this caused him to clash with the liberal mainstream. And soon the businessman declared war on another virus — «woke mind virus» (literally — «virus of awakened consciousness»). This is what he calls the imposition of ideas of political correctness, social justice, the fight against racism, and support for gay and transgender rights.
In the summer of 2022, his son Xavier Musk became a woman named Vivian Jenna Wilson, combining the gender transition with a break in relations with his father. This accelerated Musk's transformation into a fighter with left-liberal views, writes his biographer Walter Isaacson.
A few months after that, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and remade the platform for himself, in particular, changing its name to X.
But neuroscientist and blogger Sam Harris, a former friend of Musk, believes that in parallel, the social network itself was changing its owner: «His interaction with Twitter/X changed him in a way that you rarely see outside of Marvel movies or Greek mythology».
Musk became the first technology leader to radicalized by his own platform, said Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter executive, in an interview with the Financial Times.
Isaacson, Musk's biographer, suggests that the entrepreneur was trying to compensate for childhood traumas — and that buying Twitter was a kind of «adventure in the sandbox» where he was once bullied. But other commentators believe that there is nothing unique about Musk's transformation into politician.
«Business leaders, as a rule, are surrounded by sycophants. They hear all the time that they are geniuses», — noted in a interview with British columnist Nick Cohen.
«Most rich people are starting to think that, in addition to corporate power, they should also have political power».
But both Musk's critics and his supporters point out that his recent interventions cannot be seen in isolation from his alliance with Donald Trump. This is not just a tandem of two businessmen and politicians, but a fusion of two ideologies.
Musk has transformed Trumpism from a set of abstract rhetoric about the lost greatness of the United States into a actual ideological response to the problems of today's world, believes British conservative commentator Tom McTeague.
To Trump's nostalgia for America, which Americans lost, has been added «Muskism» with his dreams of colonizing Mars and implanting microchips into the brains of pigs to achieve superhuman consciousness.
American liberal historian Timothy Snyder also considers the businessman's alliance with the 47th US president to be a factor explaining his political interventions. But he defines Musk's ideology as technofascism and proposes his own name for the Trump-Musk regime. «Trumpomuskovia» (Trumpomuskovia).
Others point out that all the politicians in different countries that Musk supports share hostility towards Islam. Former Scottish First Minister Hamza Yousaf wrote an article in which he leads the reader to the conclusion that the billionaire is actually motivated by Islamophobia.
In Britain, of all right-wing figures, Musk is particularly sympathetic to Tommy Robinson, who has equated Islam with fascism and Nazism, Yousaf notes; in the Netherlands, he supports Geert Wilders, who has demanded a ban on the Koran and the closure of mosques; and in German politics – the party «Alternative for Germany», in the election program of which there was a section called «Islam has no place in Germany».
However, the Scottish politician and the American businessman have been feuding online for a long time. Musk called Yousaf a racist bastard over a video in which he spoke about racism in Scotland — Musk interpreted his words as a complaint about white supremacy.
How many divisions does a corporation have
Musk's political activity cannot be considered in isolation from his business interests. The right-wing and populist parties and politicians he supports promise low taxes, deregulation, and a rejection of state intervention in business affairs.
And those European figures Musk opposed, — the leaders of Britain, Germany, and the EU bureaucracy — on the contrary, want to control the activities of American internet giants in their jurisdictions and increase taxes and fines.
The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) threatens American tech giants with multi-billion dollar fines, in particular for failing to combat disinformation.
But fighting fake news is not profitable for social media owners. It involves huge expenses for fact-checkers—while the quality of information does not affect their business model. They need people to spend as much time on social media as possible, and for this purpose, fake news is no worse than verified news.
Analysis in the Financial Times points out that in the announcement of Facebook's decision to abandon fact-checking services, Mark Zuckerberg spoke of plans to “work with President Trump to counter the actions of governments around the world.” In November, Zuckerberg's company Meta was fined €800 billion for violating EU competition rules.
As for Musk, many experts point to the lesson he learned from the Brazilian government when it tried to ignore its regulatory requirements. After a loud and desperate campaign, Musk gave up and gave in to the demands of the Brazilian authorities.
But X — is far from Mask's main business; he owes his financial position to the electric car manufacturer Tesla and SpaceX. And here the arrival of friendly politicians to power can also be a useful factor.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Maloni, who calls Musk a friend, recently spoke about negotiations with Starlink to provide secure communications between the government, diplomats and the Italian defense agencies. According to Bloomberg, the contract could be worth more than $1.5 billion.
One of the main mistakes of modern political scientists is to believe that all power belongs to corporations, columnist Nick Cohen said in an interview with the BBC.
«Ultimately, power belongs to the state. The state still remains Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan», — Cohen noted, referring to the treatise by the 17th-century English philosopher. In it, Hobbes justifies the need for a government that keeps subjects in fear, and compares the sovereign to the biblical monster Leviathan.
Russia's recent history is further proof of this, notes Nick Cohen. After Putin came to power in 2000, the oligarchs thought they could control the president, but they discovered that not only their wealth but also their lives were in his hands. According to Cohen, Musk's capitulation to the Brazilian authorities is yet another proof of the power of Leviathan.
But now Musk has the weight of the American state on his side. During the election campaign, US Vice President J.D. Vance threatened to withdraw support for NATO if the European Union blocked X and other business projects of Musk.
However, Brussels has already indicated that it will respond to Musk's interference with regulatory pressure. An investigation launched earlier into the potential placement of disinformation and prohibited materials in X is ongoing.
In Britain, a new law on internet safety is due to come into force in March this year, which provides for significant fines and criminal liability for technology companies and social networks for violations.
Nick Cohen believes that the application of this law should be the British government's response to Mask's trolling.
«We live in democracy, and if the law is passed by parliament, it must be implemented. Another question — will this provoke retaliatory measures from the US government?», — says the columnist.
Some observers urge not to exaggerate Musk's ability to influence European politics. The main platform for his ideas — X, but in Britain it is only the sixth most popular social network, and its audience has been decreasing in recent years.
In Germany, X's reach is even smaller, and there is an element of language barrier — not all Germans read the news in English, even if they speak it.
Moreover, in the US, the attitude towards Musk is almost the same as that towards Trump: just over half of Americans have a negative view, slightly less a favorable one.
In Europe, he remains an unpopular figure: a recent poll showed that Musk's popularity among the British is falling – 44% have a negative view of him and only 26% have a positive view. Meanwhile, 73% of Germans called his intervention in German politics inappropriate.